


Traffic in Souls

by Darklady



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Future Fic, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-10
Updated: 2011-12-10
Packaged: 2017-10-27 04:20:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/291558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Darklady/pseuds/Darklady
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Claire Novak goes to church, but never prays.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Traffic in Souls

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place maybe fifteen years after the end of the episode 'The Rapture'. Potential spoilers - but I think if you haven’t seen that episode this just will not make sense.

Claire Novak goes to church daily, but never prays. Or maybe she does - if "back off you bastard" is a prayer. Prayer is talking to God, so technically maybe that qualifies.

It's not that she lacks faith. Or maybe she does. Faith is the confidence in things unseen, and she personally has seen plenty.

Sister Bernadette thinks Claire is a saint. Which is crap, because all the saints are dead and if there is one thing Claire is dedicated to it's staying alive. Staying here. Staying real. She's just doing her part to help everybody else do the same.

She’d enrolled in Religious Studies at eighteen because she had questions, and then went on to the College of Social Work because she thought they had answers. Now she's running a halfway house in downtown Detroit and it's not because she's selling either.

Claire works with ex-cons, and sometimes not-so-ex cons. (The recidivism rate is pretty much 100% until prison turns the young men into broken old ones. It's not that the local boys are particularly anti-social, or even more dishonest than your average suburbanite, it's just that there is no legal living to be made when cooking crank is the only manufacturing job in ten miles.) She hunts down emergency housing for battered girlfriends with battered kids. (The local marriage rate is running zero percent, and even if there was a wedding back when it was lost three boyfriends back, along with the house and the job and the illusion of middle-class security.) She finds cots for addicts willing to shake the monkey, and brings ice chips and aspirin while they puke out their personal demons.

Her patience surprises the volunteers. Most of those are college kids working a few months in exchange for internship credits or a brag line on their grad school application. They come down full of social justice delusions, and leave like shocked tourists loaded with horror stories for future cocktail parties.

They don't understand the work. They don't understand the purpose. They don't get why she does what she does, year after year, without some political carrot or even the hope of heaven.

She doesn't expect them to.

She does the work because she *does* understand.

She understands what it's like to lose your soul. Or your body. Or your mind. Or all three. And whether you 'did it to yourself' or not is… well, it's bullshit really. No matter what anyone says, no one really volunteers - not even if they willingly fling themselves into the pit. Because whatever they think they agreed to, they didn't have a clue about how fucked over they would get by the end.

Claire never judges the clients.

Fights them, fights for them, fights with them - but never judges them. Judgment is for dicks with wings - and she'd walk singing into Hell before she'd sign up for that.

So Claire Novak never prays.

Sometimes she pleads. Sometimes she shouts.

And sometimes? Sometimes when things are really fucked up? When the children of the street come in with midnight eyes and screaming souls? Sometimes she calls the Winchesters.

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©KKR 2011


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